From November 8th to 11th, 2018, in the frame of Paris Photo, the international art fair dedicated to photography, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury will showcase La Cour, a collaborative and evolutive photographic installation created by the artists François-Xavier Gbré and Yo-Yo Gonthier. Photography, as a field for encounters and a landscape to develop the common and itinerant reflection that the two artists started in 2017 during the 11th Rencontres de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali and are pursuing this year at Le Grand Palais in Paris.

Echoing the photographic installation, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury – Dakar is dedicating its upcoming show to these artists’ film works. On the one side, La Piscine, 2009 by François-Xavier Gbré (b.in 1978, in Lille, France, living and working in Abidjan, Ivory Coast), whose title refers to the Olympic swimming pool of Modibo Keita Stadium in Bamako, Mali, where the swimming pool stands as an architectural witness to the succession of times, and on the other, the film Une Éclaircie, 2013, by Yo-Yo Gonthier (b. 1974 in Niamey, Niger, living and working in Carbonne, France), a dreamlike vision and a luminous reflection on the transience of perceptions and on our ability to create imaginary universes from them, which then shape and enrich our relationship to the world. Two distinctive themes that are nevertheless perpetually interacting.

Future perfect

In each film, the understanding of time – time of history, time of narratives, time of images – is rooted in a complex and horizontal structure. The image, be it figurative (François-Xavier Gbré) or suggestive (Yo-Yo Gonthier), is challenging linear narration.

In La Piscine, the narrative is told in the present tense and relates the past of a future. The members of a family are commenting on François-Xavier Gré’s photographs of the dilapidated swimming pool. At the time they speak (as well as the time we are watching the video), the swimming pool has been refurbished. This future is now actual, nearly past even. It is shown by one image only, whereas shots of a previous time pass one after the other, subdued yet vibrating from the memories filled gazes of the viewers as if they were more relevant to teach us about the present than contemporary imagery. The act of remembering out loud what is buried pushes us to take responsibility for our relationship with History and our understanding of it.

In Yo-Yo Gonthier’s work, the present time narration tells the future of the past. The sunny spell has happened, a sprig of light in the dark, fleeting moment that occurs only to come to an end. The memory will stretch in the shape of a dream that can be interpreted in thousand ways, a dream built upon the shared experience of a real contemporary community that the artist has gathered, gathers and will gather again over the appearance of Le Nuage [The Cloud], the silk sculpture he created in 2013, which accompanies him in his films and performances. A sometimes scary dream from which the figure of the tightrope walker emerges. A protagonist, just as the Nuage, of a story where everything is possible and that still needs to be invented from the tangible matter of the Super 8 camera.

For Yo-Yo Gonthier and François-Xavier Gbré, multiple temporalities, both lived and imagined – assembled sequences of experiences or chronological moments in History – are expanded as opened questions to our ways of being, to our links to the world and to our place within it, the one we inherited or the one we will choose for ourselves.